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Category: Politics

Steve Bannon blasts Fox News as ‘TV for stupid people’

Steve Bannon blasts Fox News as ‘TV for stupid people’

The Daily Beast reports: Former Trump strategist Steve Bannon tore into Fox News for cutting away from a Donald Trump speech over the weekend and fact-checking the former president’s election conspiracies, calling the conservative cable giant “TV for stupid people” and an “absolute disgrace.” Briefly covering the GOP frontrunner’s campaign rally in Iowa on Saturday, Fox News anchor Arthel Neville pulled away from the twice-impeached ex-president’s tirade to remind viewers that Trump’s claims about a “rigged” election remained baseless. “Well,…

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Trump’s second term agenda: revenge

Trump’s second term agenda: revenge

David Frum writes: If Trump is elected, it very likely won’t be with a majority of the popular vote. Imagine the scenario: Trump has won the Electoral College with 46 percent of the vote because third-party candidates funded by Republican donors successfully splintered the anti-Trump coalition. Having failed to win the popular vote in each of the past three elections, Trump has become president for the second time. On that thin basis, his supporters would try to execute his schemes…

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Trump and his allies will restore their draconian zero-tolerance immigration policy

Trump and his allies will restore their draconian zero-tolerance immigration policy

Caitlin Dickerson writes: Almost as soon as Donald Trump took office in 2017, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement were dispatched across the country to round up as many undocumented foreigners as possible, and the travel ban put into limbo the livelihoods of thousands of people from majority-Muslim countries who had won the hard-fought right to be here—refugees, tech entrepreneurs, and university professors among them. The administration drew up plans for erecting a border wall, as well as an approach…

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How Trump will try to evade justice and punish his enemies

How Trump will try to evade justice and punish his enemies

Barton Gellman writes: Once Trump has installed loyalists in crucial posts, his first priority—an urgent one for a man facing 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions—would be to save himself from conviction and imprisonment. Of the four indictments against him, two are federal: the Florida case, with charges of unlawful retention of classified documents and obstruction of justice, and the Washington case, which charges Trump with unlawful efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those will be the easiest for him…

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Trump will break up NATO

Trump will break up NATO

Anne Applebaum writes: “Idon’t give a shit about NATO.” Thus did former President Donald Trump once express his feelings about America’s oldest and strongest military alliance. Not that this statement, made in the presence of John Bolton, the national security adviser at the time, came as a surprise. Long before he was a political candidate, Trump questioned the value of American alliances. Of Europeans, he once wrote that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would…

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Trump was determined to stay in power ‘at any cost,’ say prosecutors; Mike Johnson protects the insurrectionists

Trump was determined to stay in power ‘at any cost,’ say prosecutors; Mike Johnson protects the insurrectionists

AFP reports: Federal prosecutors unveiled plans on Tuesday to introduce evidence at Donald Trump’s trial for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election that shows he was determined to “remain in power at any cost.” Special counsel Jack Smith’s office, in a court filing, said the former US president had a history of “sowing mistrust” in election results and had repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he lost to Democrat Joe Biden. “The Government will offer…

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Israel investigates possible trading knowledge ahead of Oct 7 Hamas attack

Israel investigates possible trading knowledge ahead of Oct 7 Hamas attack

Reuters reports: Israeli authorities are investigating claims by U.S. researchers that some investors may have known in advance of a Hamas plan to attack Israel on Oct. 7 and used that information to profit from Israeli securities. Research by law professors Robert Jackson Jr from New York University and Joshua Mitts of Columbia University found significant short-selling of shares leading up to the attacks, which triggered a war nearly two months old. “Days before the attack, traders appeared to anticipate…

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Eligible voters are being swept up in conservative activists’ efforts to purge voter rolls

Eligible voters are being swept up in conservative activists’ efforts to purge voter rolls

CBS News reports: Voters eligible to cast ballots are already being swept up in a grassroots effort to purge the nation’s registration rolls ahead of the 2024 presidential election, a CBS News investigation has found. Fueled by doubts about the 2020 election, an army of conservative activists is poring over state voter lists, looking for registration errors that can be used to file what are known as voter challenges — questioning the registrations of thousands of Americans. The undertaking, which…

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Biden’s understudy, Gavin Newsom, waits in the wings

Biden’s understudy, Gavin Newsom, waits in the wings

Matt Bai writes: Newsom has insisted that he supports President Biden and isn’t running some kind of shadow campaign. Which is true, I guess, in the sense that there doesn’t seem to be anything shadowy about it. In just the past few months, Newsom, a vigorous 56, has met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People (looking conspicuously presidential in one of those awkward upholstered chairs); traveled to Israel to comfort survivors of the Hamas…

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White House’s stark warning: We are running out of money for Ukraine

White House’s stark warning: We are running out of money for Ukraine

The Daily Beast reports: The White House told party leaders in the House and Senate on Monday that they are running out of time to reach an agreement on sending more aide to Ukraine in its war against Russia. The director of the Office of Management and Budget, Shalanda Young, explained that a lack of funding would “kneecap Ukraine on the battlefield.” “I want to be clear: Without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out…

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Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine

Miscalculations, divisions marked offensive planning by U.S., Ukraine

The Washington Post reports: On June 15, in a conference room at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, flanked by top U.S. commanders, sat around a table with his Ukrainian counterpart, who was joined by aides from Kyiv. The room was heavy with an air of frustration. Austin, in his deliberate baritone, asked Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov about Ukraine’s decision-making in the opening days of its long-awaited counteroffensive, pressing him on why his forces weren’t using Western-supplied…

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Open secret at climate talks: The top temperature goal is mostly gone

Open secret at climate talks: The top temperature goal is mostly gone

Politico reports: Leading scientists worldwide delivered a striking dose of reality to the United Nations on Sunday: it’s “becoming inevitable” that countries will miss the ambitious target they set eight years ago for limiting the warming of the Earth. The ominous estimate points to the growing likelihood that global warming will shoot past 1.5 degrees Celsius before the end of this century, inflicting what scientists describe as an overwhelming toll from intensifying storms, drought and heat on people and the…

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Al Gore slams COP28 climate summit host UAE, says its emissions soared

Al Gore slams COP28 climate summit host UAE, says its emissions soared

Reuters reports: Climate advocate and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore on Sunday slammed the UAE – host of the COP28 climate summit – saying its position as overseer of international negotiations on global warming this year was an abuse of public trust. The comments, made to Reuters in an interview on the sidelines of the conference in Dubai, reflected skepticism among some delegates that COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber, head of the UAE’s national oil company ADNOC, can be an…

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UAE’s Cop28 president claims there is ‘no science’ behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels

UAE’s Cop28 president claims there is ‘no science’ behind demands for phase-out of fossil fuels

The Guardian reports: The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal. Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”. The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were…

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Israel is using the same tactics in Gaza that Assad employed in Syria

Israel is using the same tactics in Gaza that Assad employed in Syria

Daanish Faruqi writes: As the humanitarian pause took effect in Gaza, footage of the massive destruction in the northern part of the enclave has started to trickle in. Seeing these images of devastation, one cannot but think of Thomas Friedman’s reference to what he calls the “Hama rules” in an article he published with The New York Times on October 14. A neologism he coined many years ago, it refers to then-Syrian President Hafez al-Assad’s violent razing of the city…

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